Win7 Explorer - Slower than ever?

[NashvilleKit]

What could be causing this? I have a new fast PC (see my profile) and I spend most of my maintenance time watching the damn green bar creep slowly across the top of Windows Explorer. It seems slower than my 8-year-old PC I abandoned for this new one. I have everything on my primary (C) drive indexed but it still can take 2 or 3 minutes to completely refresh to an opened folder, etc.

I have Norton AV and I often run Ad-Watch, Spybot, etc. and some registry cleaners to keep my system trim.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Or is that just the way it is?

NashvilleKit

 

[logicearth]

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Yes.

I have Norton AV and I often run Ad-Watch, Spybot, etc. and some registry cleaners to keep my system trim. [Or other third-party software and or tweaking]

 

[karlsnooks]

NashvilleKit,
All is normal, Win 7 is still building up index info. Just ignore the green bar and keep going.

The thing is an annoyance and causes misconceptions but the bar is harmless. Your system is in order, which you can prove by:

WIN + PAUSE/BREAK keycombo | Performance Information and Tools (bottom of left-hand pane) | click on the text to run an assessment of your computers performance.

Incidentally, you are now using Win 7 and do not need all of those wonderful tools, aids, speeder-uppers, cleaners that you used before.

Win 7 comes with very effective tools.

all of those wonderful old-faithful standbys are now your enemy. Annihilate them.

 

[karlsnooks]

Oh yes,
WIN is the key with the wavy Microsoft flag.

Try such things as:
WIN + X
Win + R
Win + L
Win + Spacebar
Win + D
Win + T
Win + F1

 

[Coke Robot]

If it is a recent, as in, very recent install of 7, then it's the Indexing service running.

Norton is pretty not resource-lean, maybe more recent versions are but generally aren't. I'd recommend getting a different AV.

As for your registry cleaner, that maybe doing harm. Could you provide the product details of said cleaner? Many people here don't ever use registry cleaners and use CCleaner. But what I think might be your issue is simply registry fragmentation and not simply registry errors. I think it could be that since if you had 7 installed for a while and performance has degraded.

 

[karlsnooks]

actually, registry fragmentation is never a problem. Data fragmentation can be. Don't believe all the hype from the defrag companies.

If you want to defrag, use the built-in Win 7 Defragmenter or use CONTIG.EXE from the SysInternals folk:
Contig

 

[Coke Robot]

Hmmm, I don't know, registry fragmentation does cause overall slowness. Hard drive fragmentation obviously is, but I've seen systems where reinstalling almost seems like the best option and when the registry is defragged, it literally runs like Windows has been reinstalled.

 

[karlsnooks]

coke,
Do you have a Microsoft KB article to back up your

registry fragmentation does cause overall slowness

 

[Coke Robot]

coke,
Do you have a Microsoft KB article to back up your

registry fragmentation does cause overall slowness

No, but honestly I doubt Microsoft would say that Windows can get slow after a while of usage.

But what I do have to prove said slowness are faster startups when they took ages, Windows Explorer doesn't stop responding when you try to open many things at once, and a general overall feeling of responsiveness in programs.

I don't have hard proof I can show with startups right now since I personally have defragged my registry a week ago, but if I need to, I'll let Windows get fragged a bit to show some evidence.

 

[Britton30]

Hello NashvilleKit, I use Norton with no issues. I would however recommend getting rid of SpyBot and Ad Watch. Spybot was a good ol' program for XP and earlier but it causes issues with Win7. Both can cause system degradation and hangs. As Karlsnooks offered, the green progress bar is indexing updating and should cause no problems. Once updated it will only index new data.

 

[karlsnooks]

I agree that SpyBot and Ad-watch should be removed. They are only slowing you down and completely unneeded with Win 7.

Carry out following for me and we'll see what we can do to speed you up still more.

LIST OF STARTUP AND INSTALLED PROGRAMS USING CCLEANER


STARTUP PROGRAMS
CCleaner | Tools icon | Startup button |
click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon (top panel of a Message Reply),
attach the startup.txt file generated by CCleaner
CCleaner - Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download


INSTALLED PROGRAMS
CCleaner | Tools icon | Uninstall button |
click on Save to text file button (bottom right side)

Using the PAPER CLIP icon, attach the install.txt file
generated by CCleaner. CCleaner - Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

 

[mfp2waoe]

Incidentally, you are now using Win 7 and do not need all of those wonderful tools, aids, speeder-uppers, cleaners that you used before.

Win 7 comes with very effective tools.

all of those wonderful old-faithful standbys are now your enemy. Annihilate them.

Actually, none of them were necessary before either. They're all a bunch of snake oil.

 

[NashvilleKit]

Thanks folks!

I thank you all greatly for your thoughts. I formerly had Ad-Aware running realtime and didn't catch it (running in the hidden taskbar icon area); it seems to be the default setup and I was installing so much stuff on my new PC that I didn't notice it. It made me so mad that I uninstalled it! Based on what you guys have said, I think I'll be using Spybot very sparingly, if at all.

I also had Carbonite setup to do online backup all day long, but have changed that to only late at night now that it's caught up with me.

As for the Reg Cleaners, I ALWAYS preview what they're going to change or delete and unless I understand it, I don't let them proceed. I do know my way around the registry and it's amazing how much junk is left around when you uninstall. And I'm often trying new software.

I DO have a lot of HD space and files to fill it. I have 2.5TB in 2 drives inside and an external 2TB. The 2 interior drives are indexed. Since the external is mostly backup and CD/DVD images, I don't index it.

And I have used CCleaner for many years.

Thanks again. I think it's getting better.

 

[NashvilleKit]

Thank you, karlsnooks!
Just did what you requested with CCleaner and nearly died at how I've not been attending to my startup processes. Found lots and lots of junk. I'll attach that (where you'll see a lot of disables but not my several deletes) as soon as I can finish some clean up. Then my installs. Thanks again.